Café Starbucks

finance and administration. In spring 2002, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore agreed to give CI a $261

million grant spread over 10 years to support a campaign to slow the rate of plant and animal

extinctions across the world. It was the largest donation made to an environmental cause in U.S.

history.

CI established the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business (CELB) in 2000 in partnership

with Ford Motor Company as a new forum for collaboration between the private sector and the

environmental community. CELB’s mission was to engage the private sector worldwide in creating

solutions to critical global environmental problems in which industry played a defining role. CELB

had three areas of focus: biodiversity, water, and climate change. CELB had a full-time staff of 17 but

worked with more than 50 CI staff worldwide. The center was divided into industry groups—

energy/mining, agriculture, fisheries and forestry, travel and leisure, and climate change and

water—each led by a director. CELB’s business development and marketing program cut across all

groups.

Shade-Grown Coffee: The Chiapas Project

In the mid-1990s, CI had identified coffee as an important commodity affecting biodiversity and

conservation. “Twenty-five million acres of rain forest had been replaced by coffee plantations

around the world,” explained Glenn Prickett, CELB’s executive director. “That trend is sadly

continuing, particularly in low-quality coffee-producing regions like Vietnam and Brazil.”

Traditionally, coffee had been grown under shaded conditions, but in the 1980s new higher-yielding

varieties were introduced that were grown in full sunlight and generally in conjunction with high

agrochemical usage. The adoption of this new technology was heavily promoted by various

international aid agencies. This switch stimulated the displacement of shade-covered coffee

plantations. Some bird researchers suggested there were fewer migratory birds in the United States

because of the resultant habitat destruction.

In 1996, CI launched a pilot Conservation Coffee Program with three coffee cooperatives located

in the buffer zone of the El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico to preserve and promote

shade-grown coffee. (See Exhibit 7 for map of region.) Located on the highest ridges of the Sierra

Madre, the reserve’s 120,000 hectares (approximately 300,000 acres) of pristine rain and cloud forests

harbored one of the most diverse areas of trees in all of Central and North America. The reserve

provided a habitat for numerous rare and threatened species, including the Pavón and Quetzal birds,

jaguars, tapirs, and over 100 other species of mammals and nearly 1,000 of flora. The Sierra Madre

range was a critical habitat for migratory birds. The forest reserve was among the country’s highest

rainfall areas and therefore a major water source for the adjacent and distant Pacific Coast farms as

well as the nearby hydroelectric dams, which were the major source of electricity for southern Mexico

and exports to Central America. Standing forests helped regulate the region’s climate.

Coffee was traditionally the major crop in Chiapas, and farms had been operating around the base

of the reserve for nearly a century before the government declared it a protected area in 1972. There

were approximately 14,000 coffee farms operating adjacent to the reserve.6 Although the scientific

and preservation capacity at the reserve had increased significantly over the decades, the resources

...